Ch.4 Koch Network's Anti-Civil Rights Crusade

Part 4: Dismantling Voting Rights

One of the things the Koch network is most well known for are their aggressive anti-civil rights efforts. This includes the proliferation of voter-suppression around the United States, which disproportionately affect, and in some states overtly target, communities of color. These efforts have also explicitly targeted civil rights achievements by challenging the Voting Rights Act.

The 2013 Shelby County v. Holder court case was brought before the Supreme Court by the Project on Fair Representation, which effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act by allowing states to more easily pass legislation that suppresses the vote and disenfranchises voters. Just a year earlier, the court declined to review a similar case, Nix v. Holder, brought by the Center for Individual Rights. As reported in the American Prospect, CIR’s strategy is so clearly focused on setting precedents in the Supreme Court that “CIR attorneys asked the courts to rule against their own clients, with the apparent interest of moving the case up to the Supreme Court as quickly as possible.”

In addition to judicial strategies, the Koch network has proliferated Voter ID legislation. These laws add additional barriers to voting, some of which overwhelmingly suppress the votes of minorities, youth, and the elderly. This strategy has been carried out with the help of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization that helps corporations write and push self-interested legislation through a network of corporate-funded legislators.

Part 5 of this chapter considers how this network not only tried to roll back civil rights, but they helped drive the "tough on crime" laws of the 1990s while laying the foundations for the modern Prison Industrial Complex.

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